What's This Font 1.1 - Vanity Fair

Hey guys and welcome back for this special second edition of What's This Font! This month on the menu is one of my favorite magazines, Conde Nast's Vanity Fair. They have (for the most part) great typefaces that create an overall beautiful design throughout the issues and this post will let you know what they are and where you can find them.

The first one we'll start with is Didot. It is for all intents and purposes Vanity Fair's signature font and is used almost exclusively on the cover and most of the pages of the magazine. It's one of those fonts that you may find more common than you should. It's an elegant and at the same time modern typeface. You can find it on typography.com here for $300 for 42 typefaces. When used correctly this font has a great impact and is of course absolutely beautiful.

Font number two on our list today is VF Sans. It has five weights, two widths, and was created for Vanity Fair by David Harris (design director) and Greg Mastrianni (art director) and designed, drawn and produced by James Montalbano of Terminal Design. This typeface can be found abundantly throughout the magazine, mostly in the artciles and captions, giving it a modern edge.

Finally the third font and also the most recent design addition to the magazine is Solano designed by Mark van Bronkhorst between 2007 and 2009. This typeface is a perfect new addition to Vanity Fair's design library. It is used mostly with a wide tracking and in a smaller point size which does not tone down its importance. You can purchase Solano on myfonts.com, the price is reasonable per font, the whole family in itself though is quite expensive but definitely a good buy.
More info to come soon!

British Vogue: Quick tweak session

Here is the tweaked cover of November Bristish Vogue, done in less than 30 minutes
using the same copy, same picture and almost the same arrangement.

So from now on I will be posting very quick ( 25min) re-designs of covers that are on stands I wish had been done differently. I am using very basic fonts as my goal is to do this quickly, for this cover I used Arial and minion pro (can't go more basic than that).

Why am I tweaking the cover?

Number 1, it's great training, number 2 I might just be able to make my point better than with words. So to officially start it off, here is a very quick tweak of the November cover of British Vogue staring Jennifer Lawrence. See below for the before and after details.

U.K Vogue bodge?

Like pretty much everyone this year, I went to see the hunger games and loved Jennifer Lawrence. She's been on quite a few covers this past year so let's check this one out shall we?

Like always I'm going to start with the photography. It's quite a beautiful shot of Lawrence wearing a gorgeous Dolce & Gabbana silver and black dress.It's a great image but unfortunately nothing groundbreaking. You would expect something more amazing coming from Vogue.

Design wise it's looking up from the last issue (see previous article) but still, nothing groundbreaking here either. The color palette is very nice, that coral/red color is beautiful and complements the image well. So it's easy on the eyes BUT then again the type placement is a bit off to me. There is a lot of copy competing with each other but I think what is actually bothering more than that is the way the O of the logo is place above Lawrence's head. It's not bringing anything to the cover and the more I look at it the more it's annoying the crap out of me and it looks like a mistake more than something on purpose. Someone probably went : "oh my god this is going to look amazing"and it somehow made it to print that way. Though this would have worked if her hair had been visible inside the O.

All and all not a terrible cover but not an amazing one either. It's nice to look at and I know I'm probably being harsh but Vogue has to be held to the highest standards and in my honest opinion they can do much better.